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  • Title: European labor migration: consequences for the countries of worker origin.
    Author: Papademetriou DG.
    Journal: Int Stud Q; 1978 Sep; 22(3):377-408. PubMed ID: 12265781.
    Abstract:
    An attempt is made to critically reappraise the overall relationship between labor emigration and the economic, sociocultural, and political systems of the countries of worker origin along which emigration operates simultaneously as both a dependent and an independent variable. The emigration policy dilemmas facing sending countries have their roots in the international economic system's structural realities, as understood through the related paradigms of center/periphery and uneven development. The development gap between labor receivers and suppliers has under conditions of substantial and almost uninterrupted growth on the part of the receivers aggravated the advanced European industrial powers' structural labor shortages and exaggerated their need for large continents of foreign labor, thus literally premising their continuous growth on the constant supply of such labor. Yet, at the same time, the less developed countries (LDCs) in the European periphery were asked to play the role of industrial satellites to the industrial metropolis, a task which was most welcome in the developing countries' expansive mode of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This situation encouraged the creation of an atmosphere of negligence in the capitals of the sending countries which facilitated the gradual internationalization of labor. The reliance on foreign labor has failed to solve those serious structural economic deficiencies of labor receivers that it was purported to correct, and, in fact, may have aggravated them. Additionally, the automatic control mechanisms which has been relied upon to regulate the migrant inflow are proving very unreliable. Labor emigration has usually been posited as the vehicle for the effective mitigation of several acute structural economic problems of labor exporters, while the twin vehicles of remittances and return of trained workers offer the LDCs an opportunity to effect their own economic transformation. The expectation that returning emigrants will have acquired the occupational skills to effect the socioeconomic metamorphosis of their countries has been little more than a myth.
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